Dancing in the Shadows by Laura Bryannan

Grounding

Quite often, the reason survivors avoid placing their awareness in their bodies is due to the uncomfortable feelings they discover in there when they try to do so. Setting up a permanent means to release negative energy and stabilize the body's energies can make life with your body much easier to take.

• Have the group move into meditative awareness.
• Imagine a natural substance--a cord, a tree, a waterfall, a mountain--beginning in the inside of your abdomen (behind your belly button), coming out the base of your spine, and running to the center of the earth. (Everyone can pick the substance they feel most comfortable with.)
• Ask everyone to get in touch with this connection to Earth Mother. Remember your grounding cord when you feel spacey and disconnected and, like a kite string, it will help you find your way back to yourself. When your body is feeling uncomfortable, you can send the energy down your grounding cord into the earth and help your body feel better.
• Now ask everyone to stand up slowly, keeping their awareness on their grounding cords. Does it feel different to be connected to the earth in this way?
• Put on a fun piece of innocuous dance music (Beatles songs from the "I Want to Hold Your Hand" era work great).
• Have everyone shake it up, trying to stay aware of their legs, hips and grounding cord as they dance.
• If the dancing gets silly or exaggerated, that's fine. The name of the game here is to enjoy the feelings in the body, and to reacquaint ourselves with the strength and power of our often-despised lower halves.

Women in our culture have been helped to forget that the natural shape of a woman is bounteous of hip, thigh and bottom. If you look at any happening or hot movie made before 1965 you'll see how drastically the images of beauty have changed. The sexy women in those movies had round hips and thighs! If you've looked at any of these films, or at pictures of movie stars such as Marilyn Monroe or Ann-Margaret and thought to yourself, "Boy, is she fat," you know you've gone into agreement with today's false standards which state that women should really look like boys, not women. Let's all let go of the idea that the only good butt is a little one. Dancing is really much more fun when you've got a good booty to shake, strong thighs to shimmy, a round belly to undulate, and feet firmly planted on the ground.

Sensing and Safety

One way to help relax the body and teach it to trust is to show it some of the resources it has at its disposal. This exercise can help us learn to let go and trust another person, as well as show us how aware we really are. Women are often surprised to experience how finely-tuned their body's antennae can be. In fact, survivors are often extremely psychic--when it becomes a matter of survival to be able to read the vibes of the household or one's abuser, the soul will develop these skills pronto. It is hoped this exercise will help you experience your body's ability to accurately know what's going on out in the world.

• Have everyone in the group stand up and take a partner.
• Bring out some scarves or some other things which would serve adequately as blindfolds. One partner from each group puts on a blindfold (hereafter referred to as the adventuress) and the other will be their guide. If anyone feels too scared to put on a blindfold, tell them they can close their eyes instead.
• Have each guide walk their adventuress around the space (begin slowly). The adventuress can choose how they want to be guided--whether by hand on elbow, waist, shoulder, etc.--and should stay in communication with her guide about what is working and what isn't.
• When the adventuress indicates she feels more relaxed, the guide can become more adventurous about the "trip": perhaps moving faster, more twists and turns, backwards or forwards.
• If an adventuress feels very safe and relaxed, she might try to maneuver completely from spoken instructions her guide provides, with no body contact at all.
• Ask each guide to stay aware of how it feels to be so completely responsible for the well-being of her adventuress. Can she honor this responsibility and still have fun? Can she follow the requests and instructions of her adventuress to help her feel even more relaxed and safe?
• Ask each adventuress to stay aware of any thoughts or feelings that arise as the exercise continues. Can she drop any feelings of mistrust, tension or hyper-vigilance and truly let go? If not, can she identify why? Is there something helpful the guide could do differently that needs to be communicated?
• Now have each guide bring her adventuress to a spot approximately ten feet from a wall. Have each group slowly walk together toward the wall, telling the adventuresses to cast their awareness ahead of them and let their guide know when they feel the wall with their senses.
• The guide tells each adventuress how far away she is from the wall, then tries the exercise again. Have each group experiment as they wish. Play with trying to get as close to the wall as possible without walking into it.
• If an adventuress feels comfortable and proficient in her sensing, see if she can perceive other obstacles, such as tables or chairs.
• Lastly, have each guide place their adventuress in an open space and move about ten to fifteen feet away.
• Each guide should slowly and quietly walk toward her adventuress, while each adventuress should let her guide know when she senses her near. Play with this a bit too. How far away is your guide when you first sense her?
• After about ten or fifteen minutes, the guide and adventuress should exchange places and begin the exercise again.
• When the exercise is over, have each woman note what feelings and ideas came up for during the process.
• Share anything you care to with the group.

Raindrops on Roses...

Some sexual abuse survivors actually have a healthy relationship with their bodies. However, many survivors need to make treating their bodies lovingly into a discipline complete with schedules and timetables. Feeling more at home with your body can take some practice; this is where the idea "fake it till you make it" can come into play. That is, the more you're able to be nice to your body, the more you'll come to see it as deserving of nice treatment. If this means having to schedule a decadent bubble bath in a candle-filled bathroom every evening, do it.

Bodies like lovely smells, beautiful things to look at, arousing things to listen to, comfy things to feel, yummy things to taste, and fun things to do. Have it be part of your group's process to do at least one nice thing for their bodies each day. Tell them to jot what they do in their notebooks, as well as anything that comes up for them around it (especially if they couldn't do it).

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